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MetaQuotes 2007.07.10 17:40 

A year ago we conducted the Automated Trading Championship 2006 co-sponsored by Spacevision Switzerland SA, FXDD and Interbank FX LLC.

During its conduct, a lot of new information was gathered:

• state of accounts and Expert Advisors’ journals of all Participants (statements of the Winners: Rich, ldamiani, GODZILLA);
• public discussions of the Participants;
• news, interviews and statistical reports.
  

Look through the list of published news - you will certainly learn something new:

• Registration started!

  As of today 1st August 2006, you can begin to register for participation in “The Automated Trading Championship 2006”. Within 12 weeks of your “Expert” independently trading, you could prove your expert is the best, the most profitable!
  
  

• One Week, One Hundred of Participants

  Registration of Participants in the Automated Trading Championship 2006 has begun well. Over one hundred developers of mechanical trading systems have already submitted their experts and personal details for participation.
  
  

• Useful hints for the Championship participants

  As the rules of the Championship are rigid enough we would like to explain them in more details. As well to give help on writing correct experts.
  
  

• Interview with Sergey Kovalyov

  Sergey Kovalyov about trading, Expert Advisors, Automated Trading Championship and about his book.
  
  

• Interview with Rashid Umarov

  "The expert to win in this Championship must include 3 to 5 independent experts, which to open rather often. Say, 5 times a week for a currency pair. And they all must be supervised by another expert that would allow ones to trade and others to "warm the bench" until a more reliable signal occurs."
  
  

• 300 Developers within the First Month Registration

  Registration of the Automated Trading Championship 2006 continues. Within the first month, over 300 developers of mechanical trading systems have already submitted for participation. There is only one month left before the Championship starts.
  
  

• Interview with CodersGuru

  "Raymond Toh have said in one of his articles: “There’s no way to make profit trading Forex without firmly established rules and the discipline to obey them”. You can not obey your rules if you trade manually, believe me I tried manual trading and lost a lot of money. For the peace of your mind you have to find a programmer and describe your manual practice to him and he will give you back an Expert Advisor that makes your manual trading 100% automated!"
  
  

• Automated Trading Today and Tomorrow

  As is known, chaotic and irregular trading can result in huge financial losses. However, even having developed an effective trading strategy, one cannot be fully sure of success. Man is not a robot.
  
  

• Interview with Andrey Khatimlyanskyy

  "The Championship is a good motivation for those who write Expert Advisors to develop better programs. The rules are rather strict in order to avoid chance gains, though they eliminate many good strategies. The promised prizes impress me much, but I would add some small incentive prizes. Organization is on the up and up, and I think the technical aspect will make the grade, too. I suppose such championships should be regular. But to begin with, let us observe this current one."
  
  

• Crude Registration Results

  "The other 350 potential participants are highly recommended to make up for lost time: The registration deadline is approaching. If they linger and wait until the last day to complete their registration, we cannot guarantee that we will be able to check their details and test their Expert Advisors. This may result in having their participation refused," - says Stanislav Starikov.
  
  

• The Equipment for the Automated Trading Championship 2006

  The blade server PowerEdge 1855 at the cost of US$35 000 has been delivered to the central office of the MetaQuotes Software Corp. today. The server was ordered at the Dell Computer Corporation (USA). It took about one and a half month for it to get to its place here, in Kazan (Russia).
  
  

• Interview with Patrick Nouvion

  "I was in Vegas for the Forex Traders Expo last week or so, and still a lot of people came to me and asked "What is automated trading?" and once I told them they still could not believe it was fully automated. A lot of gurus insist on execution and how it has to be fast, mechanical. They insist on how you have to respect your own rules, well an automated expert is the perfect solution for all this, but not enough people realize it is available yet."
  
  

• Equipment Test Report

  "We knew, of course, that our terminals are rather resource-saving and that the blade server is a very powerful machine. But we did not know exactly how many terminals it could really bear. Now we know it, and we like the findings very much. We reserve the overcapacity advisedly since some expert advisors can require a large amount of computer resources", declared Stanislav Starikov.
  
  

• Registration: Final Report

  Registration for participation in the Automated Trading Championship 2006 has been fully completed. 258 developers will participate in it.
  
  

• Automated Trading Championship 2006 Has Began

  Both Participants and ourselves worked hard during these two months. Since now, nothing will depend on us or on expert developers, everything will be done automatically. We have just to watch the development of the Championship.
  
  

• Report: The Championship Started

  The Automated Trading Championship 2006 started two days ago. 258 Expert Advisors are now competing for prizes. Unfortunately, not everything went like clockwork.
  
  

• Interview with Alexander Ovchinnikov, the current Championship Leader

  I agree that stops must be placed. I just could place a StopLoss for my expert at 400 to 500 points. I think there is not a great difference, in terms of historical data of 2006. It is true, the expert does not close positions by itself. I did not even notice that during testing as I only watched profit.
  
  

• The Championship Report: First Week Results (2 – 9 October)

  So, the first of twelve Championship weeks has gone. It has brought a couple of surprises.
  
  

• Interview with Chayutra Sriboonruang (vixenme)

  No, i'm not afraid of those lost positions much because i chose USDJPY that always swing up-down. Even it intend to go up but it will come down a bit anyway. Then i believe that i still can get the profit. And also by the concept of multilotscalper this can ensure that the winning possibility is bigger... in my opinion.
  
  

• Interview with Harry Brinkhuis

  To my findings a Take Profit of 42 and a Stop Loss of 84 is the right combination for Phoenix. They are part of what I call the balance between settings, timeframe, Stop Loss and Take Profit. Other people that were testing Phoenix tried to change Take Profit and Stop Loss and got very different results. They somehow changed "The Balance"!
  
  

• Report: Jury Meeting at 11th October 2006

  Decisions made by Jury of the Automated Trading Championship.
  
  

• Championship Report: Second Week (9 – 16 October)

  The second week of the Automated Trading Championship 2006 has ended. The top three experts are replaced by others.
  
  

• Report: Jury Meeting on 19th October 2006

  Two questions were discussed at the meeting: disqualification of Participant #400239 and spike on GBPUSD of 19th of October.
  
  

• Championship Report: Third Week (16 – 23 October)

  The results of the third competition week have been summarized. Sashken returns to the Top Three, two debutants show their impressive results. On Thursday, the regular meeting of the Championship Jury took place. The Top Ten Expert Advisors are named in the report, ad well. They increased their total assets by 13 thousand dollars.
  
  

• Interview with Karol Przybytkowski (karolp)

  I decided to maximize my risk in order to have a better chance at getting to the top. I guess that many participants did the same, because someone is going to get lucky and get a high balance. In order to compete with these people, it is necessary to increase risk.
  
  

• Interview with Lingyu Jiang (jianglingyu)

  My Expert Advisor tries to catch the main trend of a day. It's based on the famous catfx50 strategy. Sometimes it will use Moving Average cross as the signal. The main indicator is StepMA. It will take 0, 1 or 2 trades a day normally, and has a StopLoss as small as 18 pips. If it wins, it makes 20-100 pips. The theory behind this expert is: "Many a pickle makes a muckle".
  
  

• Championship Report: Fourth Week (23 – 30 October)

  The fourth week of the Automated Trading Championship 2006 has ended. A month had already passed since the start of this competition, however, two months are still yet to come, therefore let us strike some balance.
  
  

• General Statistics of the First 4 Weeks

  Almost a month has passed since the competition started. Now we have some interesting statistics concerning Expert Advisors that participate in the Championship. Statistical data about the Expert Advisors' average equity, as well as amounts of profitable and losing experts are given in this report.
  
  

• Championship Report: Fifth Week (30 October - 6 November)

  The fifth week of the Automated Trading championship 2006 has ended. Hendrick scored off Vdiddi38 and took the first place. The third place was taken by ldamiani with the same open positions. The Top Ten total equity did not change.
  
  

• Interview with Alexander Egorov (Aver)

  While writing expert advisors, I knew from practice that trailing stop rarely pays off, one just loses one's profits. Though, it can be related to my experts, not to the real trading. I tried to use trailing stops instead of strictly set profit. It did not pay off.
  
  

• Statistical Report #2

  The second report contains information about the most popular symbols and timeframes, as well as about the amount of multicurrency expert advisors. Besides, statistics about the amount of closed orders, their profitability and average profit per trade are published. The report also gives the ratio between the expert profitability and the amount of positions opened by the expert, as well as the ratio between the profitability and the position holding time.
  
  

• Championship Report: Sixth Week (6-13 November)

  Six weeks of the competition are behind us now. The Automated Trading Championship 2006 is the half way through. There are continuous movements in the Top Ten. Yesterday's leaders leave their places again.
  
  

• One Server Outage

  One of the servers, on which the client terminals and Expert Advisors of the Championship Participants are working, failed last Saturday. For this reason 20 Expert Advisors did not work on Monday. All Expert Advisors have become able to continue their competition by 12 a.m. on Tuesday.
  
  

• Interview with Ilia Antonov (Via)

  Frankly speaking, the collocation of "money management" associates me to something complicated. Of course, one has to be well aware of what one does, have a good grasp of risks and their reasons. This is necessary. Otherwise, it is just a game for Strategy Tester.
  
  

• Championship Report: Seventh Week (13-20 November)

  The seventh of twelve weeks of the Automated Trading Championship 2006 has ended. The Top Ten structure has not practically changed, but the Participants are still shifting from place to place.
  
  

• Interview with Luis Guilherme Damiani (ldamiani)

  There is a myth among the newcomers (course sellers repeat it a lot): The simpler the trading system is the better. There is nothing farer from the truth! Why should a simple Trading System be profitable for such a complex phenomenon as the markets?
  
  

• Championship Report: Eighth Week (20-27 November)

  The eighth week of the Automated Trading Championship 2006 is over. Two thirds of the time provided for the competition. At the end of the previous week, the structure of the Top Ten changed significantly. However, leaders of the past weeks – ldamiani and Hendrick – managed to hold their positions.
  
  

• Statistical Report #3

  In this statistical report, we analyze 25 of the most profitable Expert Advisors. The analyses are aimed at description of such characteristics of Expert Advisors as risk level and stability.
  
  

• Interview with Merab Sturua (Merabiko)

  The most important thing for the Expert Advisor is the logic, the strategy contents. Applicability under all market conditions and a properly written code. Money management is helpful, of course. But only as an idea about how much of the deposit one can lose and how much profit one can expect to gain. If there is a clear idea of to what limits the profit-loss fluctuations can be expected, it is possible to provide the program within a half of an hour with a plough-back method or with a technique that prevents losses of the profits gained.
  
  

• Disqualification Report

  15 Participants of the Championship were disqualified or eliminated. The most frequent reson for this was violation of Clause III.6 of the Rules of the Automated Trading Championship 2006.
  
  

• Championship Report: Ninth Week (27 November - 3 December)

  The ninth week of the Automated Trading Championship 2006 was very surprising. There are only three weeks left to the end of the competition, but there are serious changes in the Top Ten. The previous weeks' leaders have lost their positions.
  
  

• Interview with Valeri Karpenko (valvk)

  The most stable Experts are those having logical processing of the most frequently occurring errors. By the way, the Championship has given a very nice statistics on such errors: both for refuses to open a position and for Experts' start. Unfortunately, traders pay not very much attention to this: either they do not have time for this or they just do not mind consumption of the server resources in the dealing center. This is why some positions are not opened or they are opened at a wrong level. So, I suppose that the higher the standard of the Experts' programming culture is, the more stable they are.
  
  

• Interview with Michael Bullock (Zonker)

  Constantly plowing back all the profit and scaling up the position is pure suicide trading on a real account. But that is not relevant, this is a competition, over 250 competitors, and only three walk away with anything. You do whatever it takes to maximize your chances to be in that Top Three. I'm not sure you can talk about risk in the context of the competition, risk implies you might lose something, but here there is only a chance to gain for those who beat the odds.
  
  

• Championship Report: Tenth Week (3-10 December)

  Ten weeks of the Automated Trading Championship 2006 are over. Only 10 trading days are left till the end of the Championship. Leaders are still rotating in the Top Ten. Anyway, Ldamiani and Hendrick and are still holding top places in the Participants Table.
  
  

• Interview with Rich

  If the market goes flat and we all are brought to a stand, I will take the first place, and the Top Three will be the same as it is now. But, judging by the widening of Bollinger Bands, the year is not expected to be closed calmly. So the fortune will shuffle all of use many times within the resting few days.
  
  

• Statistical Report #4

  This statistical report gives analytical results for 25 most profitable Expert Advisors as of the 7th of December 2006. The following characteristics of the Experts were analyzed: profit in points, efficient factor, amount of closed positions, position holding time average, percentage of profitable positions, total profit and loss, expected profit.
  
  

• Championship Report: Eleventh Week (10-17 December)

  The eleventh, the last but one week of the Automated Trading Championship 2006 is over. There are only 5 trading days left to the end of the Championship. The first place is being tightly held by Rich. Tough struggle for the second and the third place is being carried on.
  
  

• Interview with Harry Brinkhuis (Hendrick)

  Harry is a developer from the Netherlands. His Expert Advisor, Phoenix, is quite successful and always in the Top Ten of the Championship. We got information that Harry had started new developments. So we decided to ask him about details.
  
  

• Championship Winners’ Prize

  The first annual Automated Trading Championship 2006 is coming to its end. There are only two days left, which means there is plently of time still for the first 3 places to keep changing. As it was declared before, the Winners will get 80 000 dollars and much more to come.
  
  

• Organizer’s Note

  The first annual Automated Trading Championship 2006 comes to the end. Now we can give some preliminary results of the Championship. A great amount of work has been done within the last 6 months and the results of the competition are more than impressive. 258 developers from all over the world have taken part in it. This is an unique and very important event. No such events have taken place yet.
  
  

• Automated Trading Championship 2006 Is Over!

  The 12th and the last week of the first annual Automated Trading Championship 2006 is over. There will be neither moves in the Top Three nor changes in the total equity of the Top Ten. It's time to name the Winners and to present the prizes!
  
  

• Winners of the Automated Trading Championship 2006

  On the 23rd of December 2006, the first annual Automated Trading Championship 2006 was over. 258 developers had competed for the prize of totally 80 000 dollars for 12 weeks. Three developers came out on top of the competition.
  
  

• Automated Trading Championship 2007

  We are glad to inform that preparations for the Automated Trading Championship 2007 have already been started and the contest will certainly take place. There is not very much time left before it starts.